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Asheville poets, Southern novelists at Malaprop's

This page is provided exclusively to Scene each week by staffers at Malaprop's Bookstore/Cafe, 55 Haywood St., Asheville. To learn more, call 828-254-6734 or visit malaprops.com. Events described are free.

Asheville poets' 'Birdsong'

Three poets with Asheville ties and over 70 others are contributors to "Birdsong: Poems in Celebration of Birds," an anthology of sights, sounds and poetic forms, of movement, color and light that will please lovers of birds, poetry and the outdoors.

Bart White, co-editor and contributor to the book and a native of Asheville; Lorrie Jayne of Asheville; and Laurie Wilcox-Meyer of Fairview will present and read selections from "Birdsong" at Malaprop’s Bookstore/Café at 3 p.m. Aug. 27.

"Birdsong" engages readers by its sheer variety of creatures and poetic voices, and it delivers all that Eric Rounds promises in his preface to the book: “word game to haiku, sonnet to prayer ... Bee hummingbirds, northern mockingbirds, gannets, mallards, robins — all fly, nest, and sing their way through the collection. Blackbirds and black birds draw much notice: red-winged blackbirds, grackles, starlings, crows, flock throughout the book, often serving as signals of seasonal change. Hawks and owls hunt forest, field, suburbia, New York City — and always looking for a meal.”

These poems introduce us to ways of observing, means of knowing and an equally varied range of human reactions to birds and their surroundings: the desire simply to flee the piles of carrion and offal that are home to the giant hargila (“bone-swallower”); the thrill of hunt and catch, splash and awkward flight; patience and then restless envy as quietly-observed birds “spring skyward, whirl away”; hopeful exhilaration as birds return in spring following a long and desolate winter.

As readers we also feel gratitude to, in the words of Bart White, “everyone who closely watches the natural world and labors to write it.” — Virginia McKinley, bookseller

"If the Creek Don’t Rise" tells the story of Sadie Blue, a reluctant newlywed — and expectant mother — desperate to find a way out of her small Appalachian town and away from her physically abusive husband.

Weiss deftly weaves together the perspectives of townspeople in telling this story of courage and grit. Kirkus Reviews described the book as “Part gothic, part romance, part heartbreaking Loretta Lynn ballad.”

"Gradle Bird" by J.C. Sasser.(Photo: Courtesy of Malaprop's)

J.C. Sasser’s "Gradle Bird" follows teenage Gradle as she moves with her grandpa and caretaker, Leonard, out of the motel truck stop where she’d been raised and into a bigger house. The problem is the house is old, dilapidated and haunted by the ghost of Ms. Annalee Spivey.

"Gradle Bird" was shortlisted in the 2015 William Faulkner-William Wisdom novel competition and was a Spring Okra Pick by the Southern Independent Booksellers Association.

Notions of place and home are essential to both books, and both authors are intimately familiar with the settings they describe. Sasser, for example, grew up on the same stretch of Georgia’s Interstate-16 described in her novel. Weiss was born in North Carolina and spent her adolescence in Virginia. — Ryan Matthews, bookseller